<<  <  >  >>

Page 6

attending school as preparation for the future adult grind

of paying confiscatory taxes and subservience to authority

figures.  Holt even compared the dreariness of the school

day to the experience of having a "full-time painful job."18

Ultimately, Holt concluded that the most humane way to

educate a child was to homeschool him.

To disseminate his views, in 1977 Holt founded Growing

without Schooling, a bimonthly magazine about and for indi-

viduals who had removed their children from school.  The

magazine became a tool that allowed home educators, particu-

larly those who might be described as the "libertarian

left," an opportunity to network and exchange "war stories."

In summary, Holt espoused a philosophy that could be

considered a laissez faire approach to home-based education

or, as he called it, "learning by living."  It is a philoso-

phy that Holt's followers have come to describe as "un-

schooling."

What is most important and valuable about the home

as a base for children's growth into the world is

not that it is a better school than the schools

but that it isn't school at all.  It is not an

artificial place, set up to make "learning" happen

and in which nothing except "learning" ever hap-

pens.  It is a natural, organic, central, funda-

mental human institution, one might easily and

rightly say the foundation of all other human

institutions.19

The constituencies Raymond Moore and Holt individually

attracted reflected the backgrounds and lifestyles of the

two researchers.  Moore, a former Christian missionary,

earned a sizable (but hardly an exclusive) following among

parents who chose homeschooling primarily to impart tradi-

tional religious mores to their children--the Christian

right.  Holt, a humanist, became a cult figure of sorts to

the wing of the homeschooling movement that drew together

New Age devotees, ex-hippies, and homesteaders--the counter-

cultural left.

The two men earned national reputations as educational

pioneers, working independently of one another, eloquently

addressing the angst that a diverse body of Americans felt

about the modern-day educational system--a system that

seemed to exist to further the careers of educational elites